because LaTeX matters

Introduction

Whether you are working on a book, a doctoral thesis, or an extensive report, large documents can be difficult. The source code becomes confusing; you scroll back and forth to find what you are looking for; and processing the document can take minutes rather than seconds. In this article, I describe some tools and … [Read more…]

Documents with two columns are very popular, especially in academic publishing. In other scenarios, it may be desirable to have three or even more columns. In this brief post, I show how to add a separator line between columns as well as how to adapt the space between columns, for a better visual separation of … [Read more…]

There are different ways to define a specific color in LaTeX. Often, I just choose a predefined color from the xcolor package or define a color using the RGB color model. However, I personally like the red!40!blue notation best. This creates purple with 40% red and 60% blue. In this post, I will introduce these … [Read more…]

The mdframed package implements a box environment that automatically breaks boxes across multiple pages. Moreover, it allows flexible box designs. An example from the documentation that I particularly like is titled: “Theorem with separate header and the help of TikZ (complex)”. In this article, I use the example to create environments for theorems, lemmas, and … [Read more…]

TikZ/PGF is a flexible and powerful package for creating graphics in LaTeX. It’s syntax can be somewhat overwhelming at the beginning. In this post I show the basics of tree drawing using TikZ and LuaLaTeX. The following code only works with LuaLaTeX. Make sure you use the lualatex engine rather than standard tex/latex for … [Read more…]